Moving in (the next world) builds on Come As You Are, Little Umbrella Collective’s online exhibition, bringing the work into a shared physical environment. The exhibition shifts focus from individual practices to collaboration, imagining the gallery as a space of dwelling. Through painting, textile, sculpture and installation, artists collectively shape a home built through care, access and community.

From pencil to pixel, Small Frame is an assembly of experimental animated works that foreground technique and material in physical space. Curated by Jenn Tran, the exhibition brings together independent animators Jent Do, Milly Yencken, Quinn Franks, Eleanor Evans, and Tiff Yue — artists working and recognised across Australia and internationally.

In the Presence of Self (al-nafs) is grounded in repetition as both a meditative process and a quiet act of resistance, drawing on the spiritual tradition of dhikr (remembrance). The work invites the viewer into a space of tazkiyah (purification and contemplation), where the act of creation becomes ritual, discipline, and inner refinement.

Firstdraft is proud to present our inaugural micro commissioned works.

Having Swallowed a Mirror meditates on the idea that a portrait of someone else is also a portrait of the artist. This exhibition brings together three early-career artists exploring contemporary portrait painting and suggests that the practice of portrait making is a way of looking inward by looking outward.

Message Depth is an installation that examines the hidden infrastructures shaping contemporary life.

Drawing from experiences and knowledges across the Great Ocean, fa’alogo ‘o le temporary obstructions is an offering that echoes from Sāmoa, and into the labours of the dispersed.

Water frames displacement and return in Ballast, a work in conversation with Les Kennedy’s unfinished research into the HMAS Sydney II shipwreck and the familial loss it holds.

Join us for Co-working Wednesdays, a weekly, low commitment, community networking opportunity held after business hours on Wednesday from 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm (during exhibition periods).

Enjoy after hours access to cutting edge exhibitions every Wednesday until 8pm.

stockpiler is an installation drawn from the remnants of her childhood garage, a room shaped by generations of quiet accumulation and a mosaic of several conflated identities.

Guess what? In the '70s PM Gough Whitlam held an anthem quest to replace God Save the Queen. The Australian people responded eagerly with entries in notation, lyric and tape-recorded form.

Firstdraft is reviving our screening program to support ten artists working across video, film, and screen-based practice. The screening program runs from December 2025 - March 2026, offering multiple perspectives responding to two curatorial premises.

Residue, curated by Georgia Boe as a part of Firstdraft’s First Nations Curator Program, brings together the practices of three artists at different stages of their careers, working in diverse ways with charcoal.

Come As You Are introduces the individual practices that form the foundation of Little Umbrella Collective (LUC).

Fog of war is a military metaphor that has been adopted as a mechanic in strategy-map-based video games. It appears as a darkened foggy area around a player’s avatar or base, differentiating the unexplored from the explored territory on a map shared with hidden enemies.

Penal colony, police state, imperial pawn. From its genesis, Australia has operated as a carceral and militarised state. How are artists responding to a structure that is physical, legal, and material—its legacies and its projections onto other places on the planet? Hijacking, intervention, documentation, glitching—fugitive artistic methods.

Headway is a large-scale installation formed from the remnants of a year-long performance by Felix Jackson. Throughout 2024, Felix wore one new white sock each day on alternating feet. By the end of the year, 366 socks had been collected, each marked with the traces of daily use.

Alina, Olena, Lana and Jana is a single-channel digital video work and installation. It is a re-imagining of four Eastern European characters that Cubric played as an actress for various UK television and stage productions.

Mitchell Davis, David Horton and Martin John Oldfield

I Am Not My Father is a multigenerational collaboration exploring the complexities of fatherhood. Each artist brings personal experience—ranging from nurturing relationships to those shaped by absence, neglect, or trauma—into a shared conversation through textiles, sculpture, video, and an original score.

Sue Jo Wright

Labyrinths of Signs is a textile installation body of work by Sue Jo Wright, which explores the journey of identity, belonging, and the discovery of community.

Belinda Yee

This exhibition responds to the idea of 'Digital Genocide,' a term coined by Muneera Bano, Principal Research Scientist in Ethics and AI at the CSIRO. It names a hidden violence: the systematic disappearance, distortion, and underrepresentation of cohorts of women in the data that feeds machine learning and artificial intelligence.